Thursday, September 18, 2008

Weekend viewing material

The Living Room Candidate is probably the greatest site ever in the history of all internet traditions. It's an archive of presidential TV ads from 1952 to the present day courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. The entire site is golden.

You can probably learn more about any election by watching the ads on this site than you ever could in a classroom.

How did Reagan crush Mondale by such an overwhelming margin in 1984? Watch his ads.



AIDS epidemwhat? Screw that hippie garbage, I want to vote for the Gipper! I feel all happy and warm just watching that.

This is what Mondale ran.



What the shit is that? I'm not even sure what the point of this was. Mondale wants to nuke the kids? Or does Reagan? JFK? Get off the stage you boring old man.

Or Dwight Eisenhower. He was the last president to serve at least one full term and never have his approval rating dip below 50%. How was this possible? Well, the post-WWII economy was good, he pulled our troops out of an unpopular war in Korea, and he ran commercials like this.



There's no way the "We Like Ike" song won't be in your head for the rest of the day.

And some yahoo named Adlai Stevenson tried to convince us to not vote for the man with the cartoon elephant with things like this.



Decades later, Rudy Giuliani would jazz up part of her message by turning it into DRILL BABY DRILL! So much more exciting, and he decided to wear more makeup than she did.

But the most bizarre ad on there is probably this, also from the Stevenson camp that implies Eisenhower has a gay lover named Bob or something.



Anyway, there's a lot more at The Living Room Candidate, so go check it out.

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